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Samples From Page to Screen: E.M. Forster's A Room with a View, Maurice and Howards End by Megan Rand University Honors Program, Department of English, Miami University, 1998 Introduction The filmmaking team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory may be most commonly associated with film adaptations of E. M. Forster's novels, but their body of work begins long before their adaptations of A Room With a View or Howards End, and includes films that are varied in subject and content. It was in the first few years of the 1960s that Merchant and Ivory met in New York City ". . . and agreed to form an Indo-American film production company" (Long 40). They eventually organized the filming of a novel called The Householder, by an author named Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; she was the scriptwriter for the film, the first of many collaborations between her and Merchant Ivory Productions. About the life of an Indian named Prem, the film was shot in India for a total of $125,000, a minuscule amount of money on which to make a film, even thirty years ago. This early film, though, set the tone for future Merchant Ivory productions; departing from the Hollywood studio traditions of situating flashy special effects and stars guaranteed to draw crowds at the forefront of many films, their films place importance in character development, storytelling and overall dramatic quality. During the subsequent ten years, Merchant Ivory would make several feature films depicting various facets of India, as well as a documentary on the experiences of an Indian man in England. [Due to Merchant Ivory's obvious interest in India as a country and a culture, it is often asked why they did not make a film version of E. M. Forster's novel A Passage to India, which chronicles the effects the colonial India has on a group of English people during the early twentieth century. James Ivory said: "Many people thought it was strange that Merchant Ivory had no interest in A Passage to India and would ask me why, when Forster's executors at Cambridge had proposed our filming what is generally considered to be his finest work, we had turned it down. In fact, the book's fame was one of the main reasons against doing it. We felt we'd be the targets for all sorts of brickbats. . .But there was another, and a better, reason for us to decline; Satyajit Ray [a well-known Indian filmmaker] very much wanted to film A Passage to India and had even visited Forster in England in order to persuade him to give him the rights. . . But Forster stubbornly resisted letting any of his books be made into films, and Ray was rebuffed. . . However, once Forster had died and his executors had decided to lift the ban, it seems Ray was no longer as keen to make the film for a number of reasons. So I felt it was awkward to attempt to do it myself at that point" (Long 138-141).] During the 1970's, Merchant Ivory expanded their repertoire even further, filming in the U.S. as well as in India and making feature films, short films, as well as a thriller to be shown on television. Their feature films included Savages, about a group of primitive people who turn into 1930's-era dinner party guests, then go back to their primitive state at the end of the evening, and The Wild Party, a Day of the Locust-esque story about various people from the film industry who attend an ultimately disastrous party in Hollywood. A story about a day in the life of an Indian boy constitutes the 27-minute "Mahatma and the Mad Boy," and the 29- minute "Sweet Sounds" documents young musicians in New York City's Mannes College of Music preparatory school. In 1979, Merchant Ivory made The Europeans, based on Henry James' novel. The first of their well-known costume dramas, shot in 19th century houses and structures and painstakingly faithful to the book in tone and theme, if not necessarily in plot, is a clear forerunner of films such as A Room with a View and Howards End. This film marked the first time that Richard Robbins, a composer who lived in New York, wrote the score for a Merchant Ivory feature film (he had previously worked with them during the making of "Sweet Sounds," as he was the director of the Mannes College preparatory school and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's daughter's piano teacher [Long 86]). He, like Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, would come be an often-present force in the Merchant Ivory team over the next twenty years, writing scores for their films, including well-known and award-nominated ones such as A Room with a View, Howards End and The Remains of the Day. Merchant Ivory's first truly successful adaptation of a literary work, both critically and financially, came in 1984, with Henry James' The Bostonians. With cast members including such well-known actors as Vanessa Redgrave (who received an Academy Award nomination for her role), Jessica Tandy and Christopher Reeve, The Bostonians got an excellent review in The New York Times and played at two hundred theatres across the U.S., ". . . where Merchant Ivory's films had rarely been shown" (Long 137). It is fitting, then, that their next film would be A Room with a View, which was released in 1986. Based on E.M. Forster's novel, adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the film was shot over a period of ten weeks in Italy and England for $3 million. That the film would go on to make $60 million worldwide is a testament to its extreme popularity, particularly because it was classified as an "art film." It was critically praised as well, winning awards for best picture of the year from several groups, and it was nominated for eight Academy Awards in the U.S., winning for Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design and Best Screenplay Adaptation. Another adaptation of a Forster novel followed in 1987, with Maurice, a less popular, but no less well made, film. The novel had only been in publication for about ten years, since Forster's death in the mid-1970s. About a young gay man in Edwardian England who faces ostracization from the upper class society he was born into, the novel is partially autobiographical, and, like the title character, Forster feared the public's reaction to his novel. He gave permission for it to be published posthumously, and shortly thereafter Merchant Ivory adapted and filmed it. Critical reaction was positive, particularly for ". . . the film's theme of self-realization, as against external pressures to conform, that gives Maurice its universality, beyond the issue of homosexual identity it speaks to so directly" (Long 155). During the late 1980s and 1990s, Merchant Ivory continued to make a great variety of films, including a portrait of modern life in Greenwich Village entitled Slaves of New York, a mystery set in India called The Perfect Murder and, perhaps most well-known, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, a portrait of a family in 1930s and ‘40s Kansas City, starring Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman. This film was another literary adaptation, written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, from the novels Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge by Evan Connell. Merchant Ivory's third adaptation of an E.M. Forster novel came in 1993, with Howards End, another critical and popular success. With cast members including Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter and Vanessa Redgrave, among others, Howards End was nominated, and won, a number of awards, including an Academy Award for Best Actress for Emma Thompson. The film addresses many of Forster's common themes, such as class relations and the place of art and culture within a society. Though the novels A Room with a View, Maurice and Howards End are distinctly different and identifiable works of literature, they all bear the marks of their author. E.M. Forster wrote about England and the effects that country's culture has on its inhabitants. Therefore, ideas such as the class system and relationships between members of the "English Empire" and other world cultures are explored in great depth in his novels. The three film adaptations I chose to examine, all made by Merchant Ivory, demonstrate a great faithfulness and conscientiousness in the transference of Forster's ideas to the screen. As in Forster's novels, these films place great emphasis on character-driven plot development, rendering the film versions as close as possible to the novels in tone and intent. I viewed two other film versions of Forster novels, Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Passage to India (perhaps Forster's most famous work) for this project, but found that they were lacking much of what the Merchant Ivory films abound in. The screenplays were often faithful to the plots or "stories" of the respective novels, but similarities ended there. Forster's ideas and characterizations were subjugated to the filmmaker's own ideas; this does not necessarily make these films "bad," but it does render them useless for a project such as this. Additionally, characters or events which may not have dynamically contributed to the progression of the plot, but were present in the novels for purposes such as theme or symbolism, were often omitted from the film, rendering it less faithful to E.M. Forster's original ideas. The three films I chose to examine are disparate in plot and characters, but are linked by many recurring themes and patterns as well as the filmmakers' faithful adherence to E.M. Forster's original text.

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